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Abstract
Local emergency managers play a significant role in mitigating, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters. However, the fiscal stress that local governments often face limits their ability to hire and retain emergency managers within their jurisdiction. In this article, we aim to investigate public demand and support for hiring full-time, paid local emergency managers, a critical step to enhancing local emergency management capacity. We utilize the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) to examine the average amount of additional local taxes that citizens are willing to pay in order to have a full-time, paid emergency management professional in their local government. Our analysis indicates that the average willingness to pay (WTP) for hiring a full-time, paid emergency manager ranges from $24 to $28 per household in extra local tax dollars. The estimated cost-benefit ratio suggests that hiring full-time paid emergency managers could be a cost-effective option for enhancing local emergency management capacity. Furthermore, our findings show that public willingness to pay for this policy change is correlated with social trust, political beliefs, and income level.
Acknowledgements
The authors express gratitude to the University of North Carolina’s College of Arts and Science for providing financial support for gathering data. Additionally, they acknowledge the valuable input received from anonymous reviewers.
Notes
1 This survey design is approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke with the assigned IRB approval number being 11-21. The expedited review was granted approval on May 9, 2021.
2 To recruit participants, Qualtrics, Inc., sent invitations to individuals from their participant pool. Qualtrics maintains an online panel, which consists of people potentially interested in participating in surveys. They rely on a non-probability sampling method, utilizing quota sampling to create a sample representativeness of the United States population on key demographic estimates. The authors decided to use three categories for quota sampling: gender, states, and household location (urban and rural residences) and Qualtrics recruited participants accordingly. The invitation included the recruitment materials provided by the researchers. Alongside these materials, the invitation featured a survey link. Upon reviewing the recruitment materials, potential participants chose to respond to the invitation by clicking the survey link.
3 We also present results from unweighted regression analyses in the appendix. These results are generally in line with our weighted results suggesting income, ideology, and social trust are significantly related to quantitative WTP while race, ethnicity, and attitudinal aspects significantly related to qualitative WTP.
4 Total benefits were calculated using our contingent valuation and estimate sensitivity analyses. Total costs were calculated using the BLS estimates of emergency manager salaries, assuming that hiring a full-time EM would include both increase salary and other costs. We then calculated the cost-benefit ratios using the minimum benefits and maximum costs and vice versa to calculate the benefit-cost ratio range.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Junghwa Choi
Junghwa Choi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her research primarily focuses on individual behavior, perception, and preference in the context of disaster management policy.
Wesley Wehde
Wesley Wehde is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on the role of federalism in environmental and natural hazards policy preferences as well as disaster communication and response.